The Man Who Screamed So Loud the Drug Laws Changed

After early success as a comedian, Credico, pictured here in 1990, became an activist.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL A. SMITH / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY

Before the term “mass incarceration” started appearing on the front pages of newspapers, before Obama became the first sitting President to visit a federal prison, before Democrats and Republicans began working together on criminal-justice reform, Randy Credico was screaming about the injustices of America’s incarceration policies. He wasn’t writing angry op-eds for newspapers; he was, literally, screaming. One day in 2001, I found him in front of Kings County State Supreme Court, hollering at passersby: “They’re taking black children out of your neighborhood and putting them in Attica! This is a modern-day slave-auction block!” Another day, I caught him in front of Queens State Supreme Court, heckling the employees: “You guys who are assistant D.A.s—get a real job! Quit destroying lives!”

It would have been easy to dismiss him as just another New York City crank. He certainly looked the part, with his curly hair askew, a soggy cigar stuck between his lips. But, as I learned, his animosity toward the prison system was well founded: his father spent almost a decade behind bars before he was born, and he grew up hearing horrific tales about life in prison. Born in 1954, in Monterey Park, California, Credico got an early start as a comedian and appeared on the “Tonight Show” at age thirty. On air, he compared U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to Eva Braun; he never got invited back. He later believed that his radical politics—combined with a love of cocaine—had derailed his comedy career. At forty-three, he was searching for a second act when he saw a C-SPAN debate about New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, which were then the most punitive in the country. He decided that he would make it his cause to dismantle them.

He began visiting prisons in upstate New York, and befriended inmates and their families. In the spring of 1998, he held his first protest, with a few dozen inmates’ relatives, holding up posters in the rain in front of Rockefeller Center. The protests continued for years—at Rockefeller Center, at courthouses around the city, at politicians’ fund-raisers, at the State Capitol in Albany. When then Governor George Pataki held a fund-raiser at the Yale Club, Credico was across the street with inmates’ family members, waving signs and chanting. I was a reporter for the Village Voice then, and I interviewed him many times. He seemed to spend most of his days on his cell phone: planning events, badgering reporters, fielding calls from prisoners and their relatives. He had a knack for drawing attention, and for converting an argument that had largely been made with numbers into a manifestly human drama. At one point, I calculated that he had generated more than a hundred news stories, largely by inviting reporters to his events and introducing them to the families of inmates. At the end of 2004, New York’s legislators rewrote the Rockefeller drug laws. They made more reforms in 2005 and 2009.

Once his fight was over, Credico lost his focus. He turned himself into a perpetual political candidate—running for the U.S. Senate, New York City Mayor, and New York State Governor—which brought him some attention from reporters but not enough votes to pose a threat to more mainstream candidates. Cocaine and alcohol became harder to resist, and when he got drunk he had a bad habit of shooting off nasty mass e-mails to friends, acquaintances, politicians, journalists, and activists. He called various targets “shameless,” a “clown,” and a “pile of lard.” He told the leaders of one progressive group that they were all a “bunch of non working, trust funded white people.” Every morning, he would wake up unable to remember what he had written, and open his computer to discover who was no longer talking to him.

Then, in August, 2014, he got arrested in the Bronx for “menacing” a police sergeant with an umbrella. He strongly denied the charge, but after his arrest his drinking got worse. “A bottle of tequila one day, a bottle of bourbon the next day,” he says. “I was so depressed. I hated going to sleep because I knew I had to wake up.” He started working on a book, which he titled “Suicide Note.” On January 16th, the twenty-third anniversary of his father’s death, he posted pictures on his Facebook page of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and other writers who had taken their lives.

The political satirist Barry Crimmins, a friend of almost thirty-five years, picked up the phone. “It wasn’t too hard to put two and two together, so I just called him up,” Crimmins says. “Mainly I told him I loved him, and I needed him around.” At first Credico tried to deny that he was suicidal, but eventually he admitted it, and somehow, earlier this year, he got sober.

Crimmins, who has followed Credico’s activist work over the years, has a theory about what drives him. “I think all this work he’s done has been this cry of love towards his father,” he says. “I just know he thought the world of his father and never hid or ran from his criminal background, and understood early on that things can break the wrong way. You come from the wrong economic circumstances, you get in the wrong situation at a young age, you get caught up in the system, and you’re doomed.”

Now sixty-one years old, Credico has been watching the same issues that he was shouting about in the late 1990s and early 2000s command national attention. He decided to find a way back into this fight, and came up with a new cause. Inspired by Columbia University student activists—who recently convinced Columbia to become the first university to divest from companies that run private prisons—Credico is trying to persuade the public officials overseeing New York City and New York State’s pension funds to do the same.

He zeroed in on two companies, the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America (C.C.A.). (They operate county jails, state prisons, and immigration detention facilities.) New York State’s retirement fund and New York City’s pensions funds own millions of dollars of shares in both companies. Soon Credico was talking about these investments constantly. “There’s nothing worse than the exploitation of human beings for private profit,” he says. “You can’t invest in something that feeds into human misery.”

Credico has chosen a name for his campaign, EPIC (short for End Prison-Industrial Complex), and set up a Facebook page and a Web site for it. Many activists might focus on researching the companies they are targeting, but one of Credico’s first moves was to order black-and-white-striped prisoner costumes, which he plans to use when he holds protests outside the offices of the state and city comptrollers. “Whatever I have left in my bag of tricks is going to be used on this,” Credico says. “If New York rolls, I think other states would roll, too.” He may succeed again, or maybe his efforts will fizzle out. Politicians and the press are now more focused on criminal-justice reforms than they have been in years, which means his main challenge may be staying sober enough to lead his campaign.